musings on the state of capitalism.

I just imagine myself walking into the groocery store and saying..."do you have any sort of product that might help me to wash fruit?"

The oscars featured a montage of epic movies.  The moral was that you could only truly appreciate these at thhe theater.  I.e., don't stay home hunched over your PSP.  But where are you gonna see Ben Hur or The Sound of Music at a theater?  Durrr.

environmentalism and doom

Maybe environmentalism is just prolongin the suffereing. The sooner we, as a species, poison ourselves, the sooner the Earth can peacefully get on with the business of waiting for the sun to turn red giant and swallow it.


Unless without humans to eat them metahne-farting cows will cause a runaway greenhouse effect and the next thing you know, we've got Venus Mark II going on.

I would just like to point out...

That the coors commercial about how Coors will cool down a hot day is currently playing. it starts the 2004 Super Bowl champions, the New England Patriots. It is hot. A Coors train comes through the stadium. Classic rock plays. A breeze blows the cheerleader' skirts up. Coors is GOD.

Culture of empties

Reading these descriptions of the commercials that will comprise the new Coors campaign made me almost unbearably sad. Except for this book I was supposed to read in 7th grade called "winning" about a highskool footbal player's courageous life after becoming a parapalegic, I've never read anything so pathetic and empty.

Direct quotes, describing wat happens after a beer is opened:

1. The music gets louder and the party gets better.
2. People are so refreshed that they start dancing and the party gets better.
3. Coors Light can turn a dreary hot summer day into a wonderful icy-cold experience.
4. It was all a dream...or was it?

Ok, I made one of those up. i get this intense feeling of deja vu when I read these. Also a feeling that all culture is futility.

And the abyss stares back.

File under: pure complaining
Sheesh. You'd think that after I just bragged about how good I am at getting things done I would in fact be getting things done. But no. I'm on spring break I guess, but I have a metric buttload (15% larger than the imperial) of things to do for school. I might not graduate on time. My job is killing me. My current insurer doesn't cover meds I need to breathe, so I spend both a lot of money on meds and a lot of time not really breathing all that great.

At least I get to go home now.

What the heck is up with Mission of Burma? Where the heck do they get off breaking up for 20 years and then getting back together and making a great album like it was no big deal? It doesn't sound like a pale imitation of the originals. It just sounds like the next MoB album. Yesterday I turned off the best song, "Wounded World," on my CD just in time to catch the new Green Day. Oh man. There was What's Wrong With Music Today(tm) and the cure for it right there.

Getting things done.

I've been seeing a lot of this stuff around lately. The "Geting things done book" is everybody's darling these days. It seems needlessly complex. As a full-time Sys admin and a full-time media studies student, I'm under the impression that I know a thing or two about getting things done. So, here's my own recipe for productivity (and increased charisma and improved body odor):

If it is a thing to do, do it.
If you need to write it down to remember to do it, write it down.

That's about it.

I wonder what's behind the productivity industry. If I remember right. this is only the latest in a long line of people selling you a thing that will help you be more productive. Why do people flock to these crutches? Adding a ritualistic aspect is perhaps a replacement for plain old obligation motivation.

Adding this insane process to every item that drifts across your transom is just going to bog things down.

blog post

The best blog post is the one about how I'm so blah and uninspired that I can't work on my paper or on my HP-UX system. I'm bored and restelss and I already ate my sandwich and apple so I have nothing to look forward to all day. When I go home I absolutely have to do some homework, some of which is math homework, and I'd rather take a nap but then I'll never get to sleep and then waking up will kill me tomorrow. Maybe I should move over to LivJournal. Current Mood: neurasthenic

The destruction of ethics.

So, I've like totally got this Media Ethics class. Anyway, in the discussion, media ethics come up (surprise) and the values that come up the most are things like: objectivity, fairness, accuracy. You know, the ususal. And I was thinking that these values never get anyone anywhere. How about some new values and goals for journalism?

1) Be informed. Is this asking too much? Can the white house press corps ever know enough to actually report fairly?

2) Be understanding. This replaces "objectivity." This though was poked out of my head by the works of William Vollmann. The way he digs into a situation, whether in reporting, or in historical fiction goes beyond the idea of objectivity and goes deep into honest atempts at understanding.

and now there's too damned much going on around me at work for me to think clearly.

I was in Chicago over Labor day. I took this for my photojournalism class. I don't have a digital camera. This was taken on Kodak Gold 800 iso film with my trusty old Pentax MXII and scanned using a Nikon something or other negative scanner. I've got other cool photos, but no more access to the scanner.

Children play in front of a video-screen fountain at Chicago's Millennium Park, Sunday, Sept. 5, 2004, after the Chicago Jazz Festival.

sheesh.

It's been a long-ass time since I blogged. Last semester was pretty rough and I didn't get much sleep and I didn't feel like subjecting blogger to my ridiculous ravings.

So:
I've noticed a trend in music. I don't even know what to call most of the stuff on 93.3 FM here in Denver, so to explain it, I'll say that all these bands are 1) Stone Temple Pilots' fault and 2) so very lame. Staind is a great example. The message of this stuff seems to be sensitive, yet macho. Like, I'm so sorry (sung to female (probably wearing jeans whose waist is too low! (I can't believe that I just wrote that, but jeans are officially out of hand))) that I'm so tortured and angry.
It's very sensitive, (Look, babes, I'm talking about my feelings) so that the members of these bands can get laid, and macho (remember dudes, I may be telling this chick about my feelings, but I'm still totally dark and tough) so that they don't get beat up.

I wonder how well this works? I'd think that pure, swaggering rock bravado gets plenty of chicks. That's right, I've seen The Song Remains the Same. And I'd also think that even though these guys aren't like your easily beaten up sensitive poets-with-lutes-types, that they invite beatings with their lameness.

Maybe it's a market-type situation and the wants of groupies have changed in this post-AIDS world so the behavior of the bands has to change to keep up.

I don't know. I'm just glad I have a CD changer.

An Equation

The market for something to believe in is infinite* + facts and resoning are ways people justify their already-held irrational, emotional beliefs**= The role of TV news and the role of Advertising, intertwined as they are, today.

Explanations. The first term, which I think can be used as a constant in any "equation" describing human behavior, is simple: People want to believe, badly. (careful where ye put that comma) I think what makes this phrasing so apt is the treatment as a market. I am selling a THING, it's main feature is that it is SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN. The actual content isn't important outside of it's function as being a thing to believe in. Think of it in terms of survivability. Those that are things to believe in that appeal to broader samples of hosts, live and multiply and prosper. And eat brains. Sweet sweet brains.

Term 2 just describes the normal mode of functioning for people.


News and Advertising, indie and mainstream, have evolved into the right side of this equation.




* This is one of those things that I ran across that struck me as not just true, but very true. The other stuff on Hugh Macleod's site is good, but not as good as this.

** this is my own synthesis of several things that've drifted across my transom in the past few years. I swear there was a study that seemed to point to actual experimental evidence of this, but I can't find it right now.

Artsy Fartsy

Peter Bagge thinks that Shakepeare wrote "hokey, unintelligible 400-year old situation comedies," and I'm going to have to agree with that sentiment. The Tragedies and the Histories, I think, still have the power to excite and to stir, but the comedies are lame. It's hard to think that a work is funny when every joke needs an explanation. Heck, even the explanations don't help. What's all that about cuckolds and their horns? I even took a Shakespeare class and no one was able to explain it. (aside: I wonder if Ulysees (which I find funny still) will continue to age well. Maybe in 400 years it'll be an unintelligible mess. Maybe it is now.)

Anyway, that's not the point of the essay, and it's only a small part of what I agree with here. I disagree on small points, but I'm on board with the whole.

Art= commerce. It's easy for snobbish hipsteres to forget thhat the pop song ("oops, I did it again"), the blockbuster movie, and the vacuum cleaner are all art. All art done for a paycheck and with evident resultant compromises, but art. NB: Less money doesn't mean less compromises (correlation != causation and all that), it means different compromises. Poor movie maker can't make rad explosion, but can do what he wants. Rich movie maker makes rad explosion but it must please people so there is a ROI. The tricky thing is: would important art not get made without state funding? Is state funding more liekly to generate self-indulgent crap? If an artist will not create his/her art without a grant should we care?
Bach and Bethoven got state funding. huh.

The other thing I liked was about art that is supposed to "make us question our assumptions about...blah blah blah," or "blurs the lines between gender and butter..." or whatever. This art is fucking coercive man! Which is an inherently modernistic (dare I say reactoinary?) viewpoint masquerading (in the form of an unintelligible mess) as a post-modern redefinition or recontextualization (NB: these things do exist in non-hollow shell form). Good art would contain both an intended message, and plenty of room for interpretation. Or it could just be beautiful. That's still allowed, right? What? No?

I was also reminded of a great exhibit on Modernism (the art movement, not the worldview) that I saw at the Minneapolis Institue of Arts. They had an Electrolux vacuum cleaner sharing gallery space with Target's new Michael Graves products. Target is big in MN, and was a big funder of the exhibit. The romanticism of modernism, the starry-eyed promise of technology as better living gave us well-designed, cool-looking kitchen appliances. This is great, and I think that we're seeing a swing back to this aesthetic. Your blender can be art. It's OK.

Where I disagree is that I get the impression that Bagge thinks there is no room for the navel gazing installation and performance art. I, on the other hand, would just like to see a whole lot less of it.

Fun with context.

When Technical Documentation goes bad.

I particularly love #1 and #24.

#1 is pure hilarity. Can't any product be used by one kid to hit another kid? What makes this one so special? Why was it thought necessary to show this? Well, because of the rage.

#24 suffers from a huge context problem. Don't put a helicopter in this box? just a general "no helicopters?" What?

Of course the lesson from most of these is that the encoders were assuming that certain information would be had by the decoders. When a fool like me sees the helicopter box without any other information, I get confused. Can you guarantee that no serviceman would be similarly confused?

Lazinees. Cab drivers. Reportage.

CJR, which should just about be required reading, points out my favorite bias in media. The laziness bias. Stronger than any political ideology, stronger than and advertiser's pressure. Laziness. In short: A lot of reporters are interviewing their cab drivers instead of actually doing some real work. Question: is there anything at all to be gained from man-on-the-street interviews? Reporters always give it this twist, like "here's a man on the street. Here's an average joe. This is waht people really think of [Candidate *|proposition *|enron]. Aren't I great for cutting through all the talking head bullshit? Bow to me! And what do you know! The man on the street agrees with me almost exactly!"

blah.

I float down the Liffey/I'm not here/ This isn't happening

Came across a mention of what Joyce once said Finnegans wake was about:. That the Wake is a dream and that the dreamer isan old man dying by the Liffey. Sparked a little recognition is me, having just read some Beckett. The last two books of the "trilogy" seems to be the last sparks of a dying sentience. old men (or a head in a jar(!)) telling free form stories from the past. We know that Joycve and Beckett were friends, and both were interested in Jung. I wonder if they weren't both trying to explore the disintegration of a mind.

What's interesting about the thoughts of a dying old man anyway? This: Traditional walls between subjects and subjects, subjects and objects, objects and objects all begin to crumble, and the subjects and objects begin to spill over onto each other. An old man, with 70-80 years of awareness, from prelingual to post-, thoughts running like heavy rain in gutters, with old connections broken and new ones made every second. Traditional timeflow is dostorted: What happened when? Is it happening now? What came first, second, third?

For the reader who wants to be active, this stuff is great. The reader gets to decide who, what, when, and where, out of the nonauthoritative material on the page. Like a whodunit, sort of. So the reader is left to find what heshe wants in the text.

It's funny to look at the two different approaches (if that's what the Wake actually is. If it isn't, is the effect any different? hmm). Joyce with his baroque, multi-layered, punning prose v. Beckett with his pure economy of style. Wildly differring techniques leading to a similar endproduct. Ultimately writerly texts.

hypertext arrives

Hypertext never really took off the way its inventors and visionaries thought it should. Why? It's a lot of work. Creating a well-structured hypertext document with relevant links is an editing nightmare.

It's also a pain to maintain. Links go stale as whole presences drop off of the web. F'rinstance, if you want to talk about James Joyce, one of the very best references on the web is just some guy. If you create a document that has links to his site, what happens if any of the myriad things that can go wrong does, and his whole site goes away? Your doc is affected. You need to fix all your links that used that resource.

Plus! The amount of discretion put into determining which links are valid and which are invalid.

Now, with a couple of Firefox extensions, all that stuff is irrelevant. The Googlebar has a context menu option to "search for selected text." This gives you web, news, image, dictionary, and newsgroup search of whatever term in a doc you feel like searching on. The action is slightly more convoluted than a straight click-on-a-link, but it's much more seamless than copy-and-paste, or type-into-a-search-box. Now the user has control. Which words or groupings of words are you interested in? What kind of search are you interested in? The reader gets to choose. All the author needs to do is write. Authorial and editorial control are still completely available. But if the authro didnt bother to hyperlink the word "gnomon" to a good definition, the reader is about one second away from doing it himherself.

What's great is that this recognizes the impermanence of the web. There may not be a google in the future, or a dictionary.com, but a simple select and search can point anywhere. It will take advantage of future technologies (a multimedia search, a better image search, &c.).


Hypertext is coming closer to realizing its potential.

EDIT:
I just realized that this works best going from specific to general. Like, if you see the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" and search on it, you'll fond out more than you ever wanted to know about zero-wing. But if your doc has the phrase "meme" and you want it to go to a flash animation of the AYBABTU song, then the right-click thing isn't going to work real great. hmmm.

Poor Michael Jackson

MJ is such a micromanager of his image, but it's completely out of his control. In fact, the results of his PR campaign (including his face) are pretty much opposite to the intended effects.

Look, for example, at the "King of Pop" title. Googling the two phrases "Michael Jackson" and "King of pop" gives markedly different results than if you do the same search with the word "proclaimed" added.

Apparently (I can't verify this) MJ instructed MTV to refer to him by his royal title. So you do get a lot of instances of news sources (ABC, CNN, &c) calling him the "self proclaimed" king of pop. You can also find a fan run petition that professes to not know the reason that the media do this, and urges you to sign, so that he can be the proclaimed "king of pop" by his fans. So. Is he the King of Pop or not? Both, kind of.

His face is another issue. He's had an extensive amount of work done on it (I imagine blowtorches, vats of acid, and lots of cackling from the doctors) and then denied having the work done. In the process he's, instead of looking ageless or beautiful or whatever, become a poster boy for celebrity-flavored insanity.

Or how about "blanket"? To protect (ostensibly, of course. I can only go with stated intentions) his kid, said kid has only appeared in public covered in a blanket, and is only referred to as blanket. I can't imagine that being great for the kid, and it certainly doesn't make MJ look like a protecive, responsible father shielding his offspring from the limelight. He just looks too nuts to function and too rich to lock up for treatment.

He's never going to get back into control. #1 reason is that it's jut to easy for a news source to do a feature on how wacko he is. News people are like most people. Lazy. If they can get away with showing a clip of MJ dangling his kid out a window (taken by someone else's news crew), raising their eyebrows, saying "Wacko Jacko," and calling that a news segment, they will.

Plastic: Gov. Schwarzenegger Evolving Into Caricature Of A Caricature

Plastic: Gov. Schwarzenegger Evolving Into Caricature Of A Caricature

I think this is great. Saturday Night Live comes up with characters based on Arnold Shwarzenegger's public persona (a media construct). Now, more than 10 years later, Arnold uses the phrase "girlie-men," which originated in the Hans and Franz skits, in his official capacity as governor (Another public persona. You know, serious, republican Arnold). Arnold-The-Gov has now co-opted this phrase; he's subsumed this element of a parody of Arnold-The-Actor into his new self. Neither of these are Arnold himself by the way. So, what we have here is a four-fold removal from Shwarzenegger himself:

1. Arnold-the-actor. From Conan, Predator, The Running Man, &c.
2. Parody of Arnold-the-actor. They're here to pump you up.
3. Arnold-the-governor. Since he's supposed to save CA from the budget crisis, this is related to point 1.
4. Arnold-the-governor's use of parody catch phrase.

I think I need a Venn diagram instead of a list. Ouch.

And a bunch of people got offended, which isn't very interesting.